Russia: ‘Neo-Nazis’ attended the wake for Ukrainian soldier
Police officials: Officers fatally shot the driver
UNITED NATIONS – Russia’s U.N. ambassador claimed Monday that alleged “neo-Nazis” and men of military age were at the wake for a Ukrainian soldier in a village café that was hit by a missile strike last week, killing 52 people.
Vassily Nebenzia told a U.N. Security Council meeting called by Ukraine that the soldier was “a high-ranking Ukrainian nationalist,” with “a lot of neo-Nazi accomplices attending.”
In Thursday’s strike by a Russian Iskander ballistic missile, the village of Hroza in the northeastern Kharkiv region, lost over 15% of its 300 population. The café, which had reopened for the wake, was obliterated, and whole families perished.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied last Friday that Russia was responsible for the Hroza attack. He insisted, as Moscow has in the past, that the Russian military doesn’t target civilians and civilian facilities.
Nebenzia reiterated that the Russian military doesn’t target civilians and civilian facilities.
“We remind that if the Kyiv regime concentrates soldiers in a given place they become a legitimate target for strikes including from the point of view of IHL,” the initials for international humanitarian law, he told the Security Council.
He also said that putting heavy weapons and missile defenses in residential areas “is a serious violation and leads to the type of tragedy that we’ve talked about today.”
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly painted his enemies in Ukraine as “neo-Nazis,” even though the country has a Jewish president who lost relatives in the Holocaust and who heads a Western-backed, democratically elected government. The Holocaust, World War II and Nazism have been important tools for Putin in his bid to legitimize Russia’s war in Ukraine, but historians see their use as disinformation and a cynical ploy to further the Russian leader’s aims.
The wake in Hroza was for Andriy Kozyr, a soldier from Hroza who died last winter fighting Russia’s invading forces in eastern Ukraine. According to Ukrainian news reports, he was initially laid to rest elsewhere in Ukraine, as his native village remained under Russian occupation.
Kozyr’s family decided to rebury him in Hroza more than 15 months after his death, following DNA tests that confirmed his identity. Among those who died in the missile strike were his son, Dmytro Kozyr, also a soldier, and his wife Nina, who was just days short of her 21st birthday.
Nebenzia claimed that Ukraine’s government wrings its hands about civilians who died in airstrikes on hotels, hostels, cafés and shops, “and then a large number of obituaries of foreign mercenaries and soldiers appear.”
“What a coincidence,” Nebenzia said. “We do not exclude that this will be the same with Hroza.”
U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood asked everyone in the council chamber to take a moment and let the appalling fact sink in: “People gathered to grieve their loved ones must now be grieved themselves.”
“This is one of the deadliest strikes by Russia against Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion last year,” he said, stressing U.S. support for investigators from the U.N. and local authorities who have gone to Hroza to gather possible evidence of war crimes.
China’s deputy U.N. ambassador Geng Shuang said Beijing finds the heavy civilian casualties in the attack on the village “concerning.”
SAN FRANCISCO – A car rammed into the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco on Monday, coming to a stop in the lobby and creating a chaotic scene that ended with police shooting the driver, who later died at the hospital, officials said.
San Francisco police said they didn’t know why the unidentified driver smashed through the front of the consulate, located on a major street across from the city’s Japantown neighborhood. In a statement, the Chinese Consulate general described it as a “violent attack.”
Police descended on the consulate shortly after 3 p.m. on a report of a vehicle crashing into the building and urged people to avoid the area. Video from the scene showed a blue Honda sedan inside the lobby of the consulate’s visa office.
Officers entered the building, made contact with the suspect and opened fire, San Francisco police Sgt. Kathryn Winters said during a brief news conference.
Despite “life-saving efforts” the suspect died at a hospital.
Police did not describe how the shooting unfolded, how many officers fired or if the driver had a weapon. There were no reports of any injured people inside the building.
Police are working and coordinating with investigators from the U.S. State Department and the Chinese Consulate.
“I wish I could give you more, but this is a very complex investigation,” Winters said.
The statement from the Chinese Consulate general demanded more details about what happened and asked that it be “dealt with seriously in accordance with the law.”
“Our embassy severely condemns this violent attack,” the statement said.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin repeated that statement at a daily briefing Tuesday without giving any details about damage to the consulate or injuries to staff and visitors.
“We strongly urge the U.S. to launch a swift investigation and take effective measures to ensure the safety of Chinese diplomatic missions and personnel there in accordance with the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations,” Wang said, referring to the 1961 agreement governing relations between countries.
The San Francisco consulate has been targeted a number of times before.
Among the most serious was a fire set by a Chinese man on New Year’s Day 2014 at the main entrance. It charred a section of the outside of the building.
The man, who was living in the San Francisco Bay Area, told authorities he was driven by voices he was hearing. He was sentenced to nearly three years in prison.
San Francisco is preparing to host next month’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, a gathering of world leaders from Pacific Rim nations. President Joe Biden plans to attend, but it’s not clear if Chinese President Xi Jinping will come.